What is RoboCupRescue?

Disaster rescue is one of the most serious
social issue which involves very large numbers
of heterogeneous agents in the hostile environment.
The intention of the RoboCupRescue project
is to promote research and development in
this socially significant domain at various
levels involving multi-agent team work coordination,
physical robotic agents for search and rescue,
information infrastructures, personal digital
assistants, a standard simulator and decision
support systems, evaluation benchmarks for
rescue strategies and robotic systems that
are all integrated into a comprehensive systems
in future.
Built upon the success of RoboCup Soccer
project, we will provide forums of technical
discussions and competitive evaluations for
researchers and practitioners.
Two projects and leagues, Simulation Project,
Robotics and Infrastructure Project, Simulation
League and Robot League, are concurrently
proceeding at present. Integration of these
activities creates digitally-empowered international
rescue brigades in the future.

RoboCupRescue Simulation Project is a new
practical domain of RoboCup. Its main purpose
is to provide emergency decision support
by integration of disaster information, prediction,
planning, and human interface.
A generic urban disaster simulation environment
is constructed on network computers. Heterogeneous
intelligent agents such as fire fighters,
commanders, victims, volunteers, etc. conduct
search and rescue activities in this virtual
disaster world. Real-world interfaces such
as helicopter image synchronizes the virtuality
and the reality by sensing data. Mission-critical
human interfaces such as PDA support disaster
managers, disaster relief brigades, residents
and volunteers to decide their action to
minimize the disaster damage.
This problem introduces researchers advanced
and interdisciplinary research themes. As
AI/robotics research, for example, behavior
strategy (e.g. multi-agent planning, realtime/anytime
planning, heterogeneity of agents, robust
planning, mixed-initiative planning) is a
challenging problem. For disaster researchers,
RoboCupRescue works as a standard basis in
order to develop practical comprehensive
simulators adding necessary disaster modules.
RoboCupRescue Simulation Project is an open
resource of research results. Various people
worldwide participate in this simulator for
research, entertainment, training, or education
via the Internet. A diverse spectrum of possibilities
of this technology will contribute to the
creation of the safer social system in the
future.

RoboCupRescue Simulation League as a competition
is an international evaluation conference
for RoboCupRescue Simulation Project research.
The first competition is held in 2001 Seattle
RoboCup World Cup. In this year, the version
0 simulator of RoboCupRescue Simulation Project
will be used. Rule, evaluation, award, etc.
is being discussed, and will be announced
on January, 2001 for call for participants.
The detail is announced on the RoboCupRescue web page and on the mailing list. The participation is open to everyone worldwide
as the other RoboCup competitions.

Physical Rescue Robot Contest starts in 2001.
In this year, the AAAI USAR standard destroyed
building is used for the arena. The detail
will be announced in the web page.

RoboCupRescue Robotics & Infrastructure
Project

RoboCupRescue Robotics and Infrastructure
Project is planned to launch. It studies
future standard of robotic infrastructure
including robots, intelligent town, etc.
for human welfare. RoboCupRescue Robot League
is a test bed of the technology developed
in this project.

RoboCupRescue Simulation League and RoboCupRescue
Robot League will start at the RoboCup World
Cup 2001 in Seattle. The detail will be announced
in the web page. The program codes of participating
agents should be open after the competition.

Preliminary competition for the RoboCup World
Cup 2001 will be held in Osaka as a part
of RoboFesta Kansai 2001. Participants are
welcome to test their agent behaviors in
the real simulation environment as a competition
just the same as the RoboCup World Cup 2001.
This festival is internationally open to
everyone who would like to check their performance
beforehand. The secret of participants' program
code is guaranteed by the organizer.

The first competition of RoboCupRescue will
be held in Japan Open 2001. This is internationally
open although this is a domestic competition
in Japan. The rule, etc. will be basically
the same as the RoboCup World Cup 2001, but
the World Cup should include small improvement
according to the result of the Japan Open.
The program codes of participating agents
should be open after the competition. The
detail will be announced on the web page.